The following background discussion includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
The use of software such as computer-aided design programs is widespread, particularly in the field of designing of large-scale plants and related systems. During the design phase, it is desirable to account for the lifecycle of the plant with the goal to enhanced performance of the plant or system.
In addition, during a design phase, many thousands of changes may be made to a design, some of which were intentional, and others that occur as a result of changes to other components. For example, shifting a location of an absorber will cause changes to the conduits leading to and from the absorber. Because of the many changes that occur during the design phase, there is a need to not only easily identify changes made to design parameters pertaining to any section of the system so that its impact and importance (both on the particular section as well as on the entire system) can be easily ascertained, but also filter the changes to present only those changes deemed to be important to a user.
It is known to verify compatibility of revised design and display design change information to a user. See, e.g., Japanese patent publ. no. 07-121599 of Hitachi Ltd., published on May 12, 1995, and WIPO publ. no. 2011/095980 published on Aug. 11, 2011. In addition, Japanese pat. publ. no. 2004/240684 of Hitachi Ltd., published on Aug. 26, 2004, discusses improving efficiencies of piping design by analyzing the design using a thermal stress analysis to determine the design's feasibility. Japanese pat. publ. no. 07-141405 of Hitachi Ltd., published on Aug. 26, 2004, discusses how changes in piping design can affect stress analysis of the piping design.
These and all other extrinsic materials discussed herein are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated reference is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
Unless the context dictates the contrary, all ranges set forth herein should be interpreted as being inclusive of their endpoints, and open-ended ranges should be interpreted to include commercially practical values. Similarly, all lists of values should be considered as inclusive of intermediate values unless the context indicates the contrary.
Although automatic identification of changes in a design is generally known, there exists a need to analyze and filter the identified changes for a user.